Top 9 Tests Every Email Marketer Should Be Running

If you’ve read our Five Keys to Executing a Meaningful Email Marketing Test post, you now not only know that you should always be testing some aspect of your campaign, but you should also know the best practices for running your email tests.

So, what should you actually be testing? Here are the top nine aspects of your email to explore with tests:

1. Subject Line
   • Things to Test:
     • Length
     • Including a call to action
     • Including exclamation points, percentages, and discounts
       • While these are effective and tempting to use, be wary of these because you will have a higher percentage of your emails caught in spam.
     • Personalization (if your email client has those capabilities)
   • Key Metric:
     • Primary: open rate
     • Secondary: click through rate
2. Headline
   • Things to Test
     • Wording
     • Length
     • Font Sizes
     • Colors
     • Call to Action
   • Key Metric: This one is a little trickier than the subject line. We recommend looking at click through rate.
3. Message/Content
   • Things to Test:
     • Length
     • Amount of text
     • Amount of photos
     • Amount of links
   • Key Metric:
     • Click through rate
     • With links (both text links & photo links) you can use a heat map to see how many clicks each received
4. Timing
   • Things to Test: Different times of day
   • Key Metric:
     • Primary: open rate
     • Secondary: click through rate
5. Frequency 
   • Things to Test:
     • Number of emails per week
     • Number of emails per day
   • Key Metric:
     • Primary: unsubscribe rate
     • Primary: open rate
     • Secondary: click through rate
6. Call-to-Action
   • Things to Test:
     • Wording
     • Type of call-to-action (button vs. text vs. image)
     • Amount of calls-to-action
     • Placement
   • Key Metric: Click through rate (a heat map would be helpful here as well)
7. Landing Page
   • Things to Test:
     • Headling
     • Call to action (placement, color, size, etc.)
     • Copy
     • Length of copy
     • Amount of images
   • Key Metric:
     • Time on page
     • If e-commerce: purchase or registration
     • Number of email sign ups
8. From Name in Inbox
   • Key Metric:
     • Primary: open rate
     • Secondary: click through rate
9. Audience 
   • Things to Test:
     • Full email list
     • New subscribers
     • Those who have a high open rate history
     • Those who have not opened in 30/60/90 days, etc.
     • Gender
     • Age
   • Key Metric:
     • This will depend heavily on who your audience is, so a judgement call will be needed
     • Open rate
     • Click through rate

Now, these ideas and recommendations are just a drop in the bucket for the types of testing you can and should be doing when it comes to email marketing. But we have found these nine tests to be the best way to uncover great opportunities to optimize your email campaigns and keep them running successfully.